Netflix’s new German/English/Turkish/Croatian-language (that’s a mouthful) chick-flick talks about the concept of moving on and finding your roots, and the Faraway review explores how well it achieves that. This film stars Naomi Krauss, Goran Bogdan, Adnan Maral, Bahar Balci, Artjom Gilz, and Davor Tomic alongside other cast members. It is directed by Vanessa Jopp, while the screenplay is written by Jane Ainscough. Eva Katharina Bühler joins the crew as the cinematographer, while Viola Jäger produces this film.
Faraway follows a woman going through a rough couple of months building up to her mother’s funeral, which becomes the inciting event in her escaping to her mother’s secretly owned house in Croatia. She is free enough to think and recuperate her senses to realise what is important and what is trivial in the grand scheme of things.
-Faraway Review Does Not Contain Spoilers-
Rom-coms are highly entertaining projects of visual literature and have been recently getting the stripes they have deserved for a while. However, like all films, there are some rom-coms that work perfectly well and some that just don’t do well in terms of pacing or character development. For Faraway, there are multiple reasons why this film works and multiple places where it seems to fall short.
For once, it is beyond interesting to see someone follow their mother’s path, especially when it comes to owning property. It was refreshing to see the protagonist take stock of her situation and leave the house that caused problems for her in the first place. The way the writers have handled her inciting event is beautiful. They have given her the motivation to escape (cis-gender heterosexual men) and the appropriate means to achieve it.
Furthermore, they have made her an actual human with realistic responses to situations around her instead of a caricature of a person. However, the same cannot be said for the other male characters in the film who all feel like cardboard cutouts of popular archetypes in a story. If this is the filmmaker’s idea of poetic revenge, they are missing the support a more forgiving genre of film would have given. Anyhow, it is still fascinating to see female characters in this movie taking charge of the storyline and their choices.
What is most interesting about the film is that the protagonist will not let other people dictate what choices she would be making. All along, she does go on to listen to other people talk about Croatia, the house she’s in and the places it has to offer, but her steadfast nature and single-minded focus are applaudable. Also, allowing there to be a reconnection between two characters after recognising their commonalities is brilliant.
There is only one thing this writer takes qualms with, and it is the glaring presence of testosterone in a scene not built on enough legs to withstand enough drama at once. It comes out of nowhere and places itself at a crossroads of a major plot point. Additionally, everything built from the beginning by giving the female character autonomy comes crumbling down in this one linchpin scene. Even the attempts to salvage it do less justice and instead make it more obvious that there is a power dynamic that exists, and this is a forced pushback on it.
Most crucially, though, is the idea of romance in this movie. For most of it, it is truly about the main character connecting with her roots in the country and doing some soul-searching outside of the crutches of Munich. Moreover, it allows the character to exist without any familiar elements and see what kind of characteristics shine through as she interacts with complete strangers. There are distinct versions of the two characters starting from the beginning and reaching the end, which makes this movie quite well-built and cohesive.
Faraway Review: Final Thoughts
If you’re looking for a little something in your chill movie night, this is a good film. It does a great job of reminding audiences of who’s at the centre of this narrative and also gives them the autonomy to act on that characteristic. Except for that one aspect this writer mentioned above, there are not many moments in the film that seem out of place.
There are points in the film where the pacing takes a different turn and doesn’t line up with the tone of the sequence but that is mostly forgivable because of its dry and scandalous mirth. The actors all do a good job, even acting in a language that is not their own, able to convey the rooted emotion behind the words. It is always fascinating to see foreign language films and the way they handle speaking the English language and especially acting in it.
Faraway is currently streaming on Netflix. What did you think of the female protagonist in this film? Let us know in the comments below.
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